Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Carr (1996), Emery (1990: 144-172) and Holden (1999) all consider the issue of an internalised fascism in this novel.

Good Morning, Midnight - Filozofski fakultet u Splitu Good Morning, Midnight - Filozofski fakultet u Splitu

For some reason I am very vexed at this. I start wondering why I am there at all… I want to get away. I want to be out of the place […] I want to go by myself, to get into a taxi and drive along the street, to stand by myself and look down at the fountains in the cold light. Figure 2: The view of the Palais de Chaillot by night, 1937. The column behind, with the star on the top, was named the Peace Column (it does not exist anymore). By permission of the Bureau International des Expositions. Recalling the conversation with Mr. Blank, when asked about her previous job, Sasha refers to herself as a mannequin. This is a fitting term for someone attempting to drift through life unnoticed. It also associates itself perfectly with Sasha’s description of invisibility: vacant and neutral. Mannequins fill department store windows, dressed to the nine’s with the latest fashions. Yet, all of the figures are exactly alike. The eyes, nose, lips, the contour of the face—lifeless; the body, stiff and disposable—all the same. Sasha literally wants to experience life as a mannequin would; which is to say, she wants to feel nothing at all. Paris, ca. 1930Okay, so maybe Rhys isn’t such a great role model either. I could see how her world-view might have the same warping effect on a certain type of girl as Miller’s does on a certain type of boy. But I still say Good Morning, Midnight is a more grown-up book than Tropic of Cancer, just as Rhys’s Paris—glum, bitchy, lower middle-class—is less romanticized than Miller’s Brassai-esque version. Good Morning, Midnight’s ending gives room for much critical interpretation. Castro straightforwardly argues, “Sasha, rejecting and rejected by a man she could love, willingly receives her tormentor, a hostile, frightening man from the next room, in a sexual embrace” (21). Emery informs that while some see the act of “Sasha’s welcoming embrace of the nightmarish commis . . . as a welcome to death,” others see “suggestions of rebirth through transcendence of the self in union with another human being” (145-146).

Good Morning, Midnight Quotes | Explanations with Page Good Morning, Midnight Quotes | Explanations with Page

She has a remarkable ability to read what people are thinking into their looks. She can go on for a few sentences about what a waiter thinks of her before a word is spoken. Unfortunately what she thinks they are thinking is always disparaging or reproachful of her. Her mental attitude is such that she is doomed from the start in just about any human interaction. The man in the nightgown lives in the room next to Sasha’s at the hotel in Paris. He’s overly interested in her life and always tries to talk to her in the hall. He… What is it one looks for in others when one is that lonely? How differently and acutely observant and intuitive does that make a person? And how distrustful! She knows there is something in her that makes them see through her. Is it the sadness, the compliance, the vulnerability? It makes them so hateful, so pitiless. But there is no self-pity in Sasha Jensen, but a terrible ache, a yearning inside. It is something that can never be filled for its moment of birth is already over. What happens to a woman when her self-esteem becomes entirely dependent on mirrors and men. Everything about Sasha, our narrator, has seen better days, including her fur coat which she wears as a kind of memory mantra of better days. There's a febrile pressing authenticity about the way Rhys writes of this squalid repetitive purgatorial world. You can feel the squalor and fatality of Sasha's downward spiral on your skin. Sasha herself seems to have little psychological insight - betokened by the constant tears she sheds without quite knowing where they come from. As a reader you find yourself doubling up as psychoanalyst. There's a fabulous touch at the end when Rhys inverts and creates a horror show of Molly Bloom's triumphant yes to life at the end of her monologue in Ulysses. This sense of not belonging uproots her ability to stay fixed in the present, and so she must greet her own Midnight again – the past.

Sasha spends her days in a simple hotel room in Paris. She’s familiar with small, dim rooms like this one, though it’s been a while since she last lived in Paris. She was previously living in London and trying to drink herself to death, but a friend couldn’t bear to see her in such a depressing state, so she lent her money and urged her to go to Paris, thinking she needed a change.

Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice

Although in 1937 only a symbolic triumph, within a little over a year after the novel was published in April 1939, Paris would submit to the German occupation. Planning it all out. Eating. A movie. Eating again. One drink. A long walk to the hotel. Bed. Luminal. Sleep. Just sleep- no dreams. A disaffected, thirty-something guy abandons his wife, moves to Paris and sleeps with some prostitutes. His name is Henry Miller and the book is called Tropic of Cancer. I say in a loud, aggressive voice: ‘Go out and get a bottle of brandy,’ take money out of my bag and offer it to him. I shall exist on a different plane at once if I can get this room, if only for a couple of nights. It will be an omen. Who says you can’t escape from your fate? I’ll escape from mine, into room number 219. Just try me, just give me a chance.”Or was she another victim of straddling two worlds, the inner and the outer, two cultures, two expectations, hers and the other that society nursed on her since her birth? Sasha holds no illusions about the young man. René, as Emery writes, “wants Sasha’s money; he wants to use her sexually” (165). They meet again and, despite Sasha’s resistance, the gigolo breaks her down for good. After a night of verbal sparring, Sasha finally reveals to René why she is so afraid of living: Vreeland, Elizabeth. 2008. ‘Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction’ (1979) in Philip Gourevitch, ed., The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 3(Edinburgh:Canongate), pp. 195-214 Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.”